About Printed Power

Printed Power is a medical device company specializing in flexible, printed electronics for healthcare applications. Their core technology platform enables the production of ultra-thin, lightweight, and flexible biosensors that can be integrated into wearable patches, bandages, and garments — enabling continuous, non-invasive monitoring of a wide range of physiological parameters, including heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity.

Printed Power's vision is to transform patient monitoring in acute care settings — moving away from the traditional paradigm of bulky, wired monitoring equipment that tethers patients to their hospital beds, toward a model of continuous, wireless monitoring that allows patients to move freely while still giving clinicians the real-time physiological data they need to make informed care decisions.

Printed Power engaged Deerhold to design and build the IoT software platform that would power their real-time patient monitoring system — including the device connectivity layer, the real-time data processing pipeline, and the clinical dashboard that would present monitoring data to nurses and physicians at the point of care.

Hardware Development

While Deerhold's primary contribution to the Printed Power project was on the software side, our engineering team worked closely with Printed Power's hardware engineers throughout the development process to ensure tight integration between the physical sensor hardware and the software platform.

Key hardware-software integration work included:

1. Defining the data transmission protocol used by the sensor patches to communicate with the IoT gateway — including packet formats, transmission frequency, and error-correction mechanisms.
2. Developing and testing the firmware communication stack that ran on the IoT gateway devices deployed in patient rooms, handling BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) connections to multiple sensor patches simultaneously and forwarding data to the cloud platform over WiFi or cellular.
3. Designing the device management and provisioning system that enabled hospital IT teams to deploy, configure, and manage the IoT gateway devices at scale.
4. Building hardware-in-the-loop testing infrastructure that allowed the software team to test the full system — from sensor patch to clinical dashboard — using physical hardware in a controlled lab environment.

Our Software Development Strategy

Deerhold approached the Printed Power engagement with a software development strategy built around three core principles: reliability, scalability, and security.

In a clinical monitoring context, software reliability is not just a quality goal — it is a patient safety imperative. The platform had to be designed to handle device connectivity failures, network interruptions, and cloud service outages gracefully, without losing patient data or causing gaps in monitoring coverage. Deerhold implemented redundant data buffering at the gateway level, designed for at-least-once delivery semantics in the data ingestion pipeline, and built comprehensive alerting and monitoring for all system components.

Scalability was essential because the platform needed to support not just a single hospital unit or facility, but potentially hundreds of hospitals with thousands of simultaneously monitored patients. Deerhold designed the platform as a multi-tenant, cloud-native system built on AWS IoT Core and AWS Kinesis, capable of handling millions of sensor data points per minute with sub-second latency from sensor to dashboard.

Security and privacy were paramount given the sensitivity of patient health data. The platform was designed to meet HIPAA technical safeguard requirements, with end-to-end encryption of all patient data in transit and at rest, robust access controls, comprehensive audit logging, and regular third-party security assessments.

Software Development Challenges

The Printed Power project presented Deerhold's engineering team with a number of significant technical challenges:

1. Real-Time Data Processing at Scale: Each sensor patch generates several data points per second across multiple physiological channels. With dozens of monitored patients per hospital unit and potentially hundreds of hospital units on the platform, the data ingestion and processing requirements were substantial. Deerhold designed a streaming data architecture using AWS Kinesis Data Streams and AWS Lambda to process and route sensor data in real time, with automatic scaling to handle variable load.
2. Alarm Fatigue Mitigation: A known challenge in clinical monitoring is alarm fatigue — the desensitization of clinical staff to monitoring alerts due to high rates of false alarms. Deerhold worked with Printed Power's clinical advisors to implement signal processing and machine learning-based alarm algorithms that significantly reduced the rate of false alarms compared to traditional threshold-based alerting, while maintaining high sensitivity for clinically significant events.
3. EHR Integration: To maximize clinical utility, the platform needed to integrate with the electronic health record (EHR) systems in use at partner hospitals. Deerhold built a modular EHR integration layer supporting HL7 FHIR APIs, enabling the platform to read patient demographic and admission data from the EHR and to write monitoring data back to the patient record for longitudinal tracking.
4. Regulatory Compliance: As a software component of a medical device system, the Printed Power platform was subject to FDA Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) regulations. Deerhold worked with a regulatory consultant to ensure that the software development process met the requirements of IEC 62304 (Medical Device Software Lifecycle Processes), including requirements documentation, risk management, and software verification and validation.